Found an old junk PC tower of mine. Might have a new thing to mess around with

I was digging around in my basement, trying to sort some stuff out, and I had dug up one of my old machines.

It's nothing special, not even for its time, having an AMD Athlon 64 dual core CPU of some type, some Asus branded graphics card that I have no idea which kind it is (Probably Nvidia, probably not gonna check it as it is somewhat faulty and has been removed), four gigs of some kind of short Kingston RAM, probably DDR3 or something, some kind of motherboard, and it came preloaded with Windows 7. Still has the product key sticker on it lol.

This was my very first personal computer circa four or five years ago, though we've had it for nearly a decade at this point.

It was the very first machine (that wasn't a raspberry pi) that I installed Linux on to use as my main OS, as Windows 10 was usable but quite sluggish on the poor thing. My first distro was Lubuntu, which is a whole tangent I'll go on some other time.

I've been playing around with it, trying to get some stuff done with it. Gave it a quick cleaning, blowing the dust out, replacing the thermal paste on the CPU, very quick and simple stuff. I'll give it a proper cleaning later, I promise.

I tried to install a couple OSes on it as well, just messing with things. I tried ReactOS, an attempt at an opensource implementation of Windows XP. If you're familiar with the project, it might not come as a surprise that it did not work. Didn't even get to the splashscreen. It just sort of froze. I messed with some things, changing BIOS settings and whatnot, but I put very little effort into it, so I moved on.

My next idea was Void Linux, because I love pain. Void Linux was the second distro I had used on this machine when it was still in use, and I don't remember what the appeal was aside from "lol smol penguin OS".

Overall, I'm better with hardware than I am with software, and this was a prime example of that. I remember getting quite far with it when I first used it though, even managing to get a desktop environment running, though trying to get audio was a pain that I never got figured out.

Well, that was back then. Now, I froze at figuring out how to partition my hard drive, and as it was midnight at the time, I gave up.

Now, it is currently running Windows 8. I do want to get it updated to Windows 8.1, but I don't have the brainpower at the current time of 4:30 AM that I'm writing this, so that will be a later endeavour, even though I might just put Linux back on it, either that or Windows XP or something, because why not.

If anyone has any ideas on what to do with this stupid thing, lemme know. It's probably gonna end up being used as an electronics workstation PC or something. I love it too much to let it go to waste.